Evolving Research Methodologies in Gaming

In this newsletter:

* Podcast episode with Kristie J. Fisher, PhD, the Sr. Director of Global User Research, PlayStation Studios.

* Guide to designing a GenAI product: From vision to content strategy

* Poll for the AI community

The biggest challenge facing AI products isn’t whether they would use your product, it’s whether you’re delivering reasons to convince them to switch from their existing solution.

This is extra difficult when leveraging an emerging technology, like GenAI, because of key factors:

* GenAI tools ask users to give up control and have faith that the system knows what’s right—the exact opposite of what we’ve been training users to expect from productivity tools

* GenAI is still nascent and doesn’t always get it right, meaning that in some situations it will deliver an inferior output (and need to be re-prompted)

* Users quickly run out of ideas about what to prompt because they don’t know what the tech is capable of

So as much as product teams can focus on the incremental delivery of value to users, those efforts are likely to fail because we’re asking users to take a leap of faith. Something that users, especially B2B and enterprise, don’t want to do.

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That’s why this week’s episode with Kristie J. Fisher, PhD was so fascinating. Having worked on launching new products and features at XBox, Google, and Playstation, she has learned how to dive deeper into the psyche of users and gamers. In there is the secret to making a product enjoyable: defining metrics to ensure a user’s time is well spent.

When building and researching we must be committed not only to delivering value, but ensuring that the experience is enjoyable and worth changing your workflows for.

So when building your GenAI product, always create evaluative metrics for the level of impact. The higher you score, the more likely a switch. It also offers and opportunity to qualitatively investigate where and how the impact is happening so you mine valuable product ideas.

💡 Have questions about your GenAI project, post them on the Design of AI LinkedIn page.

💡 Or contact me via email to privately discuss your project

Kristie J. Fisher, PhD, has spent the last 15 years conducting user experience research and building and leading research teams across a variety of product domains, primarily in gaming. She currently leads the global PlayStation Studios User Research team. The mission of her team is to empower PlayStation's Studios to get to great faster by being vision-led and data informed. At Google she worked on Stadia, Gmail, and Ads and was a co-author of Google's People + AI Research Guidebook. Prior to Google she was at Xbox Research, collaborating with game producers and development teams to improve player experience on Xbox, Xbox Kinect, and Windows.

Guide to designing a GenAI product: From vision to content strategy

Working with GenAI requires designers to shift their mental models from deterministic to probabilistic output. Not only are you working with a new material, the technology is so new so there aren't any best practices (yet).

This guide is an overview of the technology and lessons I've learned in my own AI consulting projects working at PH1 Research and from the amazing experts we've had as guests on the Design of AI podcast (Spotify - Apple).

🎯 Continue reading the guide

Sections in this guide

* Background & reality-check

* Rationale for AI

* AI product vision

* AI product strategy

* AI product principles

* Design's role in crafting GenAI products

* Content strategy

Poll: We want to help our community better so we can deliver better resources.

We started Design of AI to help teams quickly learn how to best leverage hashtag#GenAI. In the coming months, we're launching some initiatives to improve knowledge sharing to address concerns we've heard:- Lack of archive of products/tools/features others have built- Lack of best practices- Lack of visibility on why initiatives have failed- Lack of mentorship & sense of doing it all aloneIf you have any questions or want to help with building out resources for some of these, contact us info@designof.ai

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